By Matthew E. May
The following is adapted from In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing.
Conventional wisdom says that when it comes to managing a company, we need organizations to be highly ordered, with a strong and well-defined structure, plus rules and regulations, led by a strong boss. But what if that’s wrong? What if bosslessness and self-organization give rise to an effective order far more potent than what any one individual might impose?
Take the case of the French company FAVI, a small fifty-year-old designer and manufacturer of copper alloy automotive components. FAVI employs nearly six hundred people but has gone without a personnel department for nearly thirty years. It was one of the first things CEO Jean-François Zobrist removed when he took the helm in 1983. But as I found out from Zobrist, that wasn’t all he eliminated.
There aren’t many CEOs who will say, “I am a stupid and lazy manager,” much less do so in the first conversation with a writer. This was Zobrist’s way of explaining why he puts the company in the hands of the people doing the work.
“I have no idea what people are doing,” he says.
What he means is that he does not possess the expertise to do their work, so he should therefore have no input into it. His job, as he sees it, is to “be the headlights and the windshield” of the vehicle that is FAVI, acting as the guiding light and provider of vision. FAVI is as unique as Zobrist, and different from any other factory I’ve ever been to—and I’ve been to many.
Not only does FAVI have no personnel department, it has no hierarchy anywhere. There is no middle management, no central operating committees, no time clocks or cards, and no thick employee handbooks jammed with the traditional “do this, don’t do that” policies. No one at FAVI uses the words personnel, worker, or employee. (And not because they’re English words, either.)
As far as Zobrist is concerned, most of the conventions of the modern organization don’t make much sense, and to him, centralizing operations only serves to impose “arbitrary restrictions on people’s activity and swell their own ranks to police those constraints.”
But it hasn’t always been this way.
The culture at FAVI when Zobrist came on the scene was just the opposite. If you wanted a tool, for example, you had to go to the person in charge of monitoring time cards, who kept the tools under tight security and who seemed to take a rather perverse pleasure in penalizing people for being late. If it was a hot summer day, you might find the windows closed as employees suffered in the unhealthy swelter of the metal foundry to earn a “heat premium” in their wages given for keeping the temperature above a certain threshold. The central planning committee spent two hours a week going over why production was yet again behind and deliveries were late, yet spent no time on the actual planning activity itself.
By the time he was given the leadership of FAVI, Zobrist had grown weary of what he terms the chaine de comment—the “chain of how.” In the chaine de comment culture, he says, “everyone is stupid except the CEO. If you ask the operator, he says, ‘I don’t know, talk to my supervisor.’ Then you go to the supervisor, and he says, ‘I don’t know, talk to the shop boss.’ But the shop boss doesn’t know. Neither does the director, who says, ‘Talk to the CEO.’